Front-end Fun with Sass and Coffee

Would you like to take a closer look at how tools like SASS and CoffeeScript can help you create dynamic stylesheets? Join Dylan who will show you how script files can be based on elegant, expressive source code.

The web is built on HTML, CSS and Javascript. These core web technologies are the basis of every website and web application, and like it or not, they're here to stay. These days, of course, it's rare to build a website by hand-coding static HTML pages; instead, we use tools and frameworks to build software applications that write our HTML for us. However, it's all too common to see beautiful, elegant, modular web applications deployed alongside monolithic CSS files and handwritten JavaScript code.

We'll look at how you can include these tools in your ASP.NET web applications, with full support for runtime optimisations and HTTP caching, and we'll look at which tools exist to offer first-class support for these abstractions in Visual Studio.

Dylan Beattie is a developer based in London, where he works as the tech lead at Spotlight, developing software for the theatre and casting industry. He wrote his first web page in 1994. Three years later, he found out what the Web actually was, and promptly abandoned a career in mathematics because programming looked way more fun and had at least as many brackets. He's been building Web apps on Microsoft technology since ASP was part of the Windows NT 4 Option Pack, and he was writing server-side domain models in JavaScript way before it was cool. He even once ran code in JScript.NET.